“Mr. Gosling has not commented publicly on the incident. No visual evidence of a good deed has surfaced, as it did last August after Mr. Gosling broke up a fight on Astor Place over a painting. And yet the legend has grown.”

“One reason Katniss may be speaking to so many is that she doesn’t just seem to be a new kind of female character but also represents an alternative to an enduring cultural type that the literary critic R. W. B. Lewis described as the American Adam. Lewis saw this type as ‘an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.’”

“To me, being a C.E.O., being a manager, was really a direct extension of being a programmer, which I think explains some of the things I’m good at and some of the things I’m bad at. When you’re programming, you have a very specific goal that you want to accomplish, and you do it by basically pulling together blocks of code. When I became a C.E.O., I was basically doing the same thing, except I was working with people who needed to accomplish some stuff, and it was still kind of very functional.”

“Computers are good at spotting patterns, and Dr. Wolfram thought an analysis of his own personal data might reveal patterns in his life – for example, when he was most likely to come up with new ideas, ‘preferably good ones.’”

“Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.”

“On his desk sat a cowbell, a pocketknife, a George Orwell reader and an antique ice-cream scoop. There was also a stack of business cards that read: ‘John A. White III, D.D.S. – Accidentist and Occidental Archaeologist.’”